"But I don't--"
"Let her continue," his mother said. "I feel this is important."
She glanced at Khalzin. "Just because you don't see this as a threat doesn't mean others won't. Your people take a great deal of pride in your way of life here. Change is hard. Inevitable, but it's hard. No one wants it."
He raised his eyebrow.
Something about the way she spoke, he was certain she referred to her own truth.
"I believe I have some work to do," his mother said. "I need to do some internal investigations of my own," she said.
"You agree with me?" Janae asked.
"In almost everything you said."
"What didn't you agree with?" Khalzin asked.
"That to do anything like this, there must be financial resources. Regardless of how much hate someone has, if they don't have the means to make it happen, it won't be anything but conversation. Someone had to fund this."
With that, she ended the hologram.
Khalzin sighed.
"Does that mean she likes me?" Janae asked.
"Surprisingly, yes."
"Why is it surprising?"
"She and my father were two of the officials that were against this project."
"Of course, they were," she said.
8
"Your parents didn't want you to do this at all?" Janae asked as they both sat down to eat.
It was the last thing she wanted to do, to eat, but Khalzin insisted, and he'd been pressured to take time to eat by the guards.
Which was weird when she thought about it because he was supposed to be the one in charge, but the guards seemed to be the ones telling him what he should or shouldn't do. The dynamics here didn't make sense to her.
Maybe she had a strange view of what royalty meant. Or whatever it was that Khalzin was. Important, anyway. Having been ordinary her whole life, maybe she had a twisted view of what it meant not to be common. Something to think about while she ate the stew one of the guards brought them. It was pretty good, she thought. Lots of vegetables. At least, she assumed they were vegetables. They tasted good, regardless.
Not like what she would have scrounged up from the back of a food distributor. She rarely had fresh food--usually, it was all day old and thrown out because it wasn't any good anymore.
She wondered if Khalzin ever had to scrounge for food. Would he even know what to do? How to find something to eat?
He stirred his stew. It didn't appeal to him as it did for her, she guessed.
"For your people to participate with the program?" she continued.
"My father doesn't believe we need to bring in new humanoids to rebalance our genome. He believes we can preserve it just as it is, and with some careful splitting and splicing, rebalance it ourselves." His expression had darkened, and even his skin tones seemed to shift darker or deeper or something. Influenced by his emotions.
"And you don't think so?"
He shook his head. "There is too much in the data that says otherwise. We need new genomes to keep our species surviving and thriving."
"And why don't you show that data to your father?"
